Crimes commited by under tens soars

By Robert Clarke

It was revealed this week that over 3000 crimes are committed each year by children under the age of ten, under current British legislation anyone found committing a crime under the age of ten is not held accountable, the crime does however get recorded and as such serves as an indefinite suspended sentence, not much of a deterrent.
66 of these crimes were of a sexual nature.

Bob Reitemeier - Chief executive of children's charity 'The Children's Society' stated
''If you look at how children are treated by the Government and legislation, you have to be 18 to be able to vote, 16 to have sex and yet ten to be held accountable for committing a crime'' the charity goes on to make the statement that the ''age of criminal responsibility should be raised to the age of 14''.

If the Labour government was to follow this and raise it to 14 (there are no current plans to alter the current legislation) that would give all youngsters who are already anti-social a further get-out clause to commit more crimes with no fear of being able to be arrested and charged, for example they would be more shoplifting, and adult thieves would exploit this by becoming 'Fagin's' telling children to commit crimes for them, as they will hold no accountability.

Just recently Ernest Norton was killed by 5 youths whilst playing cricket with his grandson, just because he told a group of youths to go away, they then started throwing rocks at him, sadly one of the rocks hit his head and the Ernest duly had a heart attack, one member of the group had just turned 10 when the incident happened.

If the law had been in place that 10 year old would not have been accountable for manslaughter, which is only one step away from murder, barred by the fact the youths did not intend to kill Mr. Norton.

If it had happened a few months earlier this same 'child' would have walked free after taking away the life of an innocent grandfather.

The human rights and children’s societies that protect these people need to wake up and realize that the youths of today are no longer living a sheltered life, they are growing up much quicker and understand at an early stage what is the correct way to behave, in the current climate of street crime and anti-social behavior we must not increase the age for accountability but lower it as times have long since changed.